Saturday, September 3, 2016

Battlefield 1 Open Beta

I still think it's an unimaginative and uninspired addition to the series and so far I'm not seeing anything that's going to change that opinion.

That said, it's not a bad game, even in Beta. It plays well, seems to have better game balance than any of its predecessors and it's visually appealing.

Of course I felt much the same way about most of the Battlefield Betas including Hardline and Battlefront. BTW Yes, I consider Battlefront part of the family and looking at Battlefield 1 that position is justified.

If you're good at Battlefront you'll be good at Battlefield 1 mostly because Battlefield 1 looks and plays like a re-skinned Battlefront from the combat, weapons, and vehicles to the leveling system.

That's not necessarily a bad thing and it was kind of cool to ride a horse but it seemed more like a gimmick than a new combat dynamic. It's really not that different from riding a motorcycle aside from the rhythmic bouncing of the screen and even that can be cured by switching to third person view.

I wouldn't do a pre-order. I don't see anything here worth the $60 buy in and definitely not any more than that.

Maybe someday I'll pick it up but not at full price. Even in the Beta players are already figuring out how to glitch the game to their advantage and finding favorite camping spots. In fact the map used in the Beta, Sinai Desert seemed tailor made for campers.

The nice thing about this Beta is that you have an opportunity to try out everything. Hand to hand, Air and ground vehicle combat ( including the horse ) offer a good sampling of what to expect on release.

As for the system requirements....

Technically my rig isn't supposed to be able to play this game but as the video below shows, it's possible. I've got an old Core I7 860 with 8GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon 6970. I had to do a registry hack to fool the launcher into thinking I had a newer version of the AMD driver than I was actually able to install. The game wants the AMD Crimson 16.20 or above but the 6970 tops out at the 15.7 driver.

I had no issues with gameplay or framerate either. The video may seem to contradict that but it was the fault of my streaming setup not the game. During play everything was smooth and I experienced no crashes.

Which pretty much disproves that new games demand new video hardware. In my case the limitation was artificial. Yet another example of how marketing ruins gaming.

So that's it. Check out the video below and try to ignore the freeze-frame spots.